


Icarus

by BitchtearsandButtsecks (HandbagMurder)



Series: Homestuck [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: 'of sorts' being the operative phrase, Angst, Classical Nonsensery, Frottage, M/M, Photographer!Dave, Sadstuck, Sex, Somewhat Confusing Plot of Sorts, Topping from the Bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-23
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:11:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandbagMurder/pseuds/BitchtearsandButtsecks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Strider, discontent photographer, is looking for the meaning of life through the greyscale frames on a roll of film. He finds it, one San Francisco spring, but liberation from the window of his lens is not forthcoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Icarus

 

 _“Never regret thy fall,_ __  
O Icarus of the fearless flight  
For the greatest tragedy of them all   
Is never to feel the burning light.”

 _-Oscar Wilde_ __

 

The crisp spring morning that finds Dave Strider hopping into the cab is not one of lush green beauty, with meadows that glitter in green sunrise or birds that chime merrily as they swoop across the boundless sky. Rather it is foggy, the air smelling oily and dark, because that is what it always smells like around these parts, in the fissuring streets walled by towering apartment blocks and the groggy rush of early traffic laying down choking trails of smoke in its wake.

And yet to Dave, it feels like no other morning he has ever seen before.

“Airport.” He instructs the driver calmly, his voice a characteristic silk that betrays neither secrets nor lies. The man behind the wheel has a moment to think that this fellow, with his camera bag and small red suitcase, is atypically cool for a Texan, before he pulls into the street, hand flicking the counter on so the numbers re-set to zero.

“Where are you off to?” he asks. Dave sighs. If he had wanted the third degree about where he was going he would have gone to his brothers stupid funeral. Let his aunts and uncles worry about the direction in which Dave steered his life. He didn’t give a fuck.

“Dunno.” He responds, deadpan. “Wherever there’s a ticket.”

The driver understands that a man who speaks with such shortness does not wish to be questioned further.

The drive to the airport is brief and uneventful, the city skyline slowly bowing from buildings to houses to farmland, which as the sun draws higher begins to bake a little. When the airport shimmers into view, Dave produces a fifty dollar bill from his pocket and passes it over.

“Is this enough?”

“…” the man wants to say that it’s more, but he doesn’t want to bother this guy any more than necessary. He’s only just realised that Dave has not removed the large polarised sunglasses he stepped into the taxi wearing, and this makes him distinctly uncomfortable. He cannot place why.

“The cost is thirty fifty.”

“This will do.” Dave informs him, pressing the bill into his hand. “Buy your wife something nice. Edible panties or some shit, I don’t care.”

Dave takes his case and his camera, and slips out of the taxi.

The airport is no more lustrous than the stack of flats from which Dave came, but he does not notice this, removing his sunglasses only as he boards, so the people in the neatly creased airline uniform can compare his passport. He sees the looks they give him, behind their tight, weary smiles, and he winces a little inside, fingers rubbing the edge of his glasses for bravery.

This weakness is immediately hidden again once he is on the plane, and his glasses are replanted firmly on his face. It is fortunate, Dave had been given a window seat, and he spends the first twenty minutes of his flight taking pictures as the earth begins to peal out from below. Dave does that sort of thing a lot though, taking pointless pictures. Of more or less everything he can see.

Dave takes a lot of pictures because he can never see the world unless it is through the lenses of his camera.

If it is beautiful, Dave will photograph it, if it is ugly, Dave will photograph it. The more his camera clicks and clicks, the more his SD card drags its weight full of photos, the closer Dave feels to understanding his world, and the world of everyone else around him. He has built himself a box with his images, the entire scope of his existence framed within four straight edges and chemical colour, and it isn’t something he even thinks about doing any more. He just does it, in an attempt to capture the bur that is reality, and the cascade of colour and light and sound that whirls in his own mind.

Dave tried music once, to express himself, but found he was not as good at it as his brother. He tried art as well, but his skills were limited only to the field of irony. For far too long Dave believed himself incurable, a human being tightly trapped, with no way out, no way to make himself heard, or feel important. Sometimes, Dave still feels like this, but never, _never_ when he has his camera. Dave would probably die, without his camera.

And so it is that the morning gives way into afternoon, and having exhausted every single possible shot that the patchwork quilt of landscape below can offer, Dave lets his heavy Nikon fall into his lap, and his blonde head tip backwards in weariness, his eyes behind his glasses slipping shut and his mind spiralling away into the black and white land of sleep.

✙

Dave’s plane touches down in San Francisco on a gloomy, foggy evening, the heat from the day leaking slowly onto the harbour and then dissolving into the sea. He is the first through customs, having taken his little red case onboard as hand luggage, and wastes no time finding himself a taxi and journeying directly into the city, where he supposes he will find cheep hotel. There are a few, but they are all full, and in the end he has to check into a bed and breakfast, in the middle of a cosy suburb he has no idea how he arrived at, at ten fifteen pm that night.

 When he rings the doorbell of the place, he thinks that if he can’t get a room he will just go down to the harbour and sit, watch the sun rising and maybe get some pictures. He’s not really fussy, because Dave doesn’t sleep much and that rest he got on the plane would be enough to last him for the next twenty or so hours.

He gets a room. The lady who answers the door is kindly, with cascading back hair and glasses. Her name is Jade, she tells him, as she leads him through the exotic, Victorian style foyer, cluttered with alien plants and faded pictures of golden era starlets to sign him in. What is his?

“Dave Strider,” he replies, presenting her with ID so she can write down his details in her book. “Professional photographer.”

She lifts her eyebrows and nods.

“Really Dave? Well it’s nice to have you in my home. Would you like a wake up call in the morning?”

Dave does not. He thanks Jade and follows her dutifully up the stairs, looking closely at all the photos that decorate the flocked wallpapered ascension past three closed doors and a turret-style bay window. There are hunting trophies on the wall, and they make Dave a little uncomfortable with the way they stare at him in glassy eyed mourning. He stops halfway up the stairs to take a photo, and then hurries back up smoothly so that Jade doesn’t notice he is gone.

“Here’s your room.” She tells him kindly. “Breakfast is at ten, but I’m usually up at five, tending to the garden and such.”

Dave nods, and appreciates the way she sort of just doesn’t expect a smile in return. He decides he liked this woman already, even with her creepy stuffed animals. She seems very perceptive, pausing by the door to give him a knowing look, taking in his ironic sunglasses and torn jeans, his hair clipped and styled with severe, sarcastic neatness. She thinks he looks very much like the shy, outwardly aloft type, the sort of man who fancied himself to be smooth and chill, but understanding that if he opened his mouth to say something, he was going to crack the illusion entirely and collapse into a puddle of awkward. It is cute. She feels very pitying toward him, especially in relation to the shadowy sort of karma that he seems surrounded by. She isn’t sure what is holding it away, but she really hopes it stays. She doesn’t want this guest to be bringing misfortune on her house, regardless of how sweet she thinks he is.

“Draw the curtains in the evenings.” She warns him softly, running a heavily ringed hand through her hair. “The sun shins directly in here, and heats the room something fierce. It’s like a furnace.”

“Will do.” Dave tells her, setting his case on the neatly made up bed. “Goodnight.”

“Night.” Jade gives him one last look before she leaves, “Sweet dreams. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Dave thinks that in such a neat, impersonal, pretty place, bedbugs wouldn’t even dare to show their heads.

✙

The next day in San Francisco is chilly, but Dave likes the cold, having grown up in perpetual, sweltering heat, and he wears only a long sleeved t-shirt and cut-off jeans, a red scarf draped as more of a fashion statement than a functional accessory around his neck. After checking out his window, and seeing that the dense mist of the evening before has not lifted, Dave equips his camera with an 80A blue filter, to saturate the eerie blue colour, and slips a diffusion filter, cross screen, and two correcting filters of varying strength into his bag.

He sneaks out of the house without being caught by Jade, or any other guests, and being invited through for breakfast. He congratulates himself on this.

Out on the street Dave stops by a kiosk to buy a bottle of apple juice. It is cold, and refreshing, and the sugar in it rushes through his bloodstream, quickening him in a way that the few hours of sleep he had got did not. When he reaches a local park, still twenty or so minutes walk in god knows what direction from the harbour he has decided he wants to subjectify extensively, he takes a detour, wandering through the frosty grass and snapping pictures here and there, of a dewy tree branch, or a dilapidated swing.

He sees a flock of crowing black birds fighting over some sort of carrion (squirrel maybe) a little way from the path, and swerves to capture this. After a fugitive look around, to make sure no one else is around to see this lapse of cool, he lowers himself to his stomach, perhaps ten or so metres away, and adjusts the zoom on his lens. The grass is wetting his stomach through his shirt, and the cold pricks the hair on his arms, but he doesn’t notice because he is too busy in the photo, trying to capture the precise shimmer of black feathers, the exact, survivalist instinct in beady bird eyes. In a flutter the birds are startled, and Dave catches three short exposure shots of the murder taking flight, silver morning spraying in arcs from their fanned wings. He adjusts his aperture perfectly, robotically, and tips his camera skyward to capture them flying away. Two more shots and Dave sighs, lowering his camera and clicking ‘review’ on the digital menu.

The pictures are good, but not great. Dave feels like they are flat, like they are still missing something. The 3D description of real beauty, of honesty about his subject and the strings of faded meat they dragged from the dead animals bones, is too smooth and romantic. There is no savagery in it, which had made the scene so alive to him in the first place. It always makes him sad, the way that no-one, not even the best photographer in the world and certainly not him, could ever precisely grab a clip which didn’t romanticise an image just a bit. That didn’t curve the corners of life, to make it more appealing to a lamely naive human eye. Dave clicks his tongue and stands. Sure, in twenty years this picture might stir a little bit of feeling in him, clearly describing the vicious perfection of this buzzard and prey world, but never again would he feel the stomach flip flop he experienced when he first saw it, marked in his frontal lobe by his imaginary frame-set. He would never again feel that aching lift which almost drew him up in their wake, toward freedom.

He would never be able to dissect this lifetime, with the sharp precision of beaks and claws.

Sometimes it hurts him, to know that he will probably die trying.

✙

Dave is having a cool, calm sandwich on a harbour side bench when he sees it, a tree in the distance, just beginning to bud leaves but rustling still, with the fathers of a hundred or so winged devils. He stops chewing immediately and stands up, totally ignoring the appreciative looks he is earning from young girls that pass by as he fumbles through his camera bag for his polariser. He swears when he realises he hasn’t got it, but decides that he will just have to adjust the photo on the computer. That goddamned sun! If only it had been a few degrees further to the left. Then the contrast would have been perfect.

Jamming his sandwich in his pocket (an action he will later regret) Dave strides across the park toward the tree in question, not stopping as one would expect, far enough from it to take a shot, but rather walking all the way up to it, so his breastbone is pressing all the way against the bark. Surprisingly few people notice this, and those who do do not pay him any attention, their eyes simply sliding on by back to their real lives, ignoring the youth whose mind seems a million miles away. Dave moves his camera, so that it hangs against his hip, and lifts his arms to embrace the tree. It isn’t really something he does because he thinks it will be necessary to a good photo, it is more something he does because, as it were, Dave can’t usually touch his subjects, and that lack of physical contact with something, anything, certainly has a way of cutting a man down.

If anyone asks he can always say he is simply being ironic.

Above him, the caws and flaps of birds is deafening, and after about two minutes of standing pressed against the tree, (which is too large for him to reach around in its entirety,) feeling the coolness and texture of the earthy smelling bark, Dave drops his arms, wiping his top smooth and stepping back.

It is then he lifts his camera to his face and shoots a picture of this subject for the first time.

It is a lack lustre photo, Dave probably won’t even look on it when it is on his computer, but it does get him into the rhythm of running shot after shot on as he steps away and edges around the tree, switching from digital to black and white film, occasionally, as his obscenely expensive camera is apt to do. Dave likes being able to use film, although it lacks the freedom to delete space that digital provided. He likes the clockwork rhythm of rolling the film, setting the aperture, adjusting the focus… snapping the camera and then doing it all over again. He just wishes that it didn’t use so much film as it did, being otherwise indisposed when it came to money to buy more.

Before Dave has noticed the universe outside his lens, he has backed almost the whole distance from the tree, fitting it into an entire frame, and rounded the thing entirely, dancing like some sort of madman. Dave is one of the people who maintained they are cool and smooth to the end, no matter how stupid everyone says they looked when taking photos, and so it would not have bothered him to hear that he looks ridiculous, lunging and bowing and crouching and twisting and-

Tripping, his thonged foot plunging into something unpleasantly cold and squishy behind him, his balance see-sawing and then giving as his other foot catches on some sort of line or blanket or something as well. He falls with a graceless, uncool thump, and swears loudly, his camera sliding off his chest and thunking to the side, his head spinning as he lay there on his back and looked up at the gap of sky between the tops of the trees. It looks faded and grey, even more so through his glasses.

“… Um… are you okay?” a face wavers into focus over him, and Dave’s brows furrow for a moment. Whoever it is has a handsome, unfamiliar expression of concern, his lips and eyes shadowed by the sunlight overhead. Dave blinks a few times, and opens his mouth to say something, but finds he can not. His brain had been knocked a gear by his fall, and is still taking its time to catch.

Rather he takes his camera, switches on auto, and snaps a photo. The man jumps, startled, and pulls his head back out of the frame of Dave’s vision. He glances at his company in bewilderment, a young lady much too offended by Dave’s disrespectful treatment of her potato salad, (it was this he had stood in,) to care.

The couple had been out on a celebration date. After announcing their engagement three days earlier, John and Rose, as they are called, were indulging themselves in a weekend away from Washington, coming to San Francisco perhaps naively, anticipating some warm weather and sun. They had not been anticipating an eccentric, brooding Texan with a camera to fall into their poorly thought out grey-day picnic like some sort of bird shot from heaven, but then nothing in this world ever really turns out how one plans does it? Why should fate make an allowance this one time? Even more shocking for them, but they had not actually even noticed him prancing around the tree taking pictures. His fall had been as much a shock to them as it was to Dave, and both are still recovering, Rose with a little irritation, John with the compulsion to laugh so hard he peed himself and his fiancée was embarrassed to be with him in public.

“Sup.” Dave greets a lot smoother than he had arrived. “I’m Dave.” He drops his camera and holds his hand up, offering it only to John, as Rose is not in his peripheral yet and for all intensive purposes, may as well not exist.

John laughs a little, full of inherent awkwardness, and shakes the mans upside down hand.

“John.” He replies. “John Egbert.”

Dave jerks his chin, and sits up.

Two things happen at once then, one being that he is struck by a wave of vertigo, as happens sometimes when you haven’t eaten more than a bottle of apple juice in twenty four hours, and the second he notices the petite blonde woman, her lips dark with lipstick, her eyes carefully lined and feline in a face of stony disapproval. She would have been very pretty, and although Dave has no way of knowing it she is usually a very sweet, nice sort of a girl. But she had worked very hard on that potato salad, and she is not happy about having not managed to even get a bite.

“Sup.” Dave holds his hand at her too. “I’m Dave.”

“You’re standing in my potato salad.” She clips. “I hope you are happy with yourself.”

Dave glances at his foot. He isn’t particularly, but nor is he fussed on arguing with flighty broads today. He removes the large bowl of creamed potato substance from his foot (or vice versa) and handed it back to her.

“No problem. I can just wash my foot.”

“I’m not worried about your foot I’m worried about-“

“Rose.” John silences her not with a warning but an affectionate smile. “It was an accident.”

Rose grumbles and sets the infected bowl as far away from her as she can. There is grass in it, from the sole of Dave’s flip-flop.

“So.” John chirps, calling Dave’s attention back to himself. “Sorry about tripping you up, we weren’t expecting anyone to call is all.”

“No problem.” Dave raises his camera and takes another blithe picture of the man, which for some reason makes him blush very red and try to smooth down rumpled hair. “Sorry about falling. I got all lost in the moment and shit. That happens sometimes.” He takes another photo, oblivious to how rude a gesture this may be. John clears his throat, very uncomfortable and looks away. He probably would be more uncomfortable if he could know the exact thoughts going through Dave’s blinkered, picture frame mind.

John is the most perfect, beautiful thing that Dave Strider has ever had the fortune to step in the potato salad of.

He is a little older than Dave, but not by much, his face is relatively normal if one is going to talk about practicalities like that, with a square jaw, slightly average nose, and a bit of a gap between his teeth that gives him a cute sort of charm when he smiles. His eyes are normal, his cheeks okay. All in all John Egbert is a normal, healthy sized guy, but there is something about him that only Dave can see right now, and it has a lot to do with the colour that leechs around him, like the auras people sometimes captured, a fast flash halo in a cosy low light.

John’s hair is raven black, it is the precise tone and silk of the wings of the birds Dave adores to photograph. His eyes are the colour of the summer sky which arches over every city in the world save Texas, which always seems to run bleached and pale. His windblown hair spikes his corona, creating an energy of flippancy and freedom, like he is made from the blue of the endless sea and the white of the undulating wind. He seems like the sort of man who might be able to stand up this moment and fly, anywhere, everywhere, a million miles away.

Oh how Dave coveted that freedom.

In comparison, Dave, who grew up in a mechanical world of heat and endless time, in summers that melted the tar on the road and stuck a man harder in place the more he seemed to struggle, is a husk of a human being. He struggles to find that understanding, that liberation, in the gears and leavers of a focus camera, and every time that external world slips between the cracks of incessant summer and a youth that never ends. Time in Dave’s world stands still, his life is like a prison and he can’t even properly photograph the outside. Oh God what he would give for the life of this man, whose wings are welded to his soul, and whose eyes reflect every sky and every sea across all schemes of age and eons.

He thinks that there is something delectably ironic, about how of all potato salad, of all the people in the world he could have stood in, Dave happened to have collapsed into the lap of this one.

He thinks that overall, some sort of cosmic trickster might just be playing a very cruel joke.

✙

John helps him up, and then makes to send him on his way with a cheerful laugh and a reassurance that it was just potato salad, and of little consequence.

Dave of course, has extreme trouble leaving the young man be. While he would never be so outwardly uncool as to make a nuisance of himself, it is an accepted fact that the Strider brain seems to be missing that integral filter which defined ‘creepy’ and ‘awkward’. Just a glimpse at Dave’s deceased brother’s porn stash would explain that. Where the older Strider had been free to express this mental perversion through inappropriate objectumsexuality, Dave is much more inclined toward the ridiculous and stalker-ish, that is to say that after politely (or as politely as Dave could manage) withdrawing from the couples merry little picnic, he takes throne beneath a tree not so far away, and watches around the trunk with his lower lip drawn beneath his front teeth just in case the one John Egbert decides to leave without giving him any warning. This gesture, though questionable, makes absolute legitimate sense in Dave’s mind. He is a cool guy, after all. Anyone who doesn’t understand that well that is just their problem.

He snaps the occasional photo, revelling in his ultra telescopic-zoom whenever John smiles just so, or curves his neck in the precise right way. Dave doesn’t think much on it, certainly not that these photos will be worth anything to anyone besides himself, but then again Dave isn’t going to look at the images until he gets back to the bed and breakfast. He knows that if he does, he will grow distracted, and that will entirely destroy his subsequent plan.

That is he follows John and his fiancé when they leave the park, right the way back to their hotel.

He can’t even think of a reason to justify why.

When he gets there, he hangs around outside for a while, unable to decide what to do with himself, and takes a few photographs of the architecture of the area. It is nothing remarkable, but then Dave has an eye for the intricacies of the mundane, a deep appreciation for everything remotely artistic, from the rust stains that drain down the side of a old stuccoed building to the broken cobwebs that flutter like sad lace from the top of a crooked fire hydrant. There is something severely lacking, in the way that this encounter played out. He feels that the whole ordeal is lacking some sort of conclusion. Perhaps it was the way John had brushed his shoulder when he bade him goodbye, perhaps it was the way that remembering the man made his nape prickle and his heart feel strangely light. Perhaps it was the virginal glimpse of something else, outside the red light of his developing room and the mechanisms of his pinhole world, which had hooked him on a line and was making no sign of letting go.

Dave wants John. He wants John badly, in the blank, uncompromising way of someone who does not necessarily understand the way normal people cast relationships. He wants to look at John, to study John, to capture every single square inch of John’s body on film and explore it with ruthless, uncompromising eyes. He wanted to strip John down, to look at him for every moment, of every day. To absorb John into his photos and draw John with the ghostly inverse colours that glimmer when you hold them up to the light. Because John is flawless. John is perfect in every imaginable way, and Dave just wants to keep feeling that forever. He wants to work tirelessly until he masters it, that unholy skill of capturing every last percentage of a thing on paper, and take so many photos of John that long after existing as a human, he remains in chemicals on Dave’s wall.

Nothing would make him happier.

✙

Later that evening the artist sits in his bed and breakfast with his laptop open and his camera plugged in, sorting through the photos he had taken and nursing a steaming mug of white hot chocolate. In the bleached silver light of his computer, Dave Strider looks tired, but handsome, his eyes usually hidden behind glasses half cast, his lips turned down a little at the corner. His hair is wet, he had taken a shower when he had gotten back in an attempt to wash his discontent away, but he couldn’t shake it. He hadn’t really expected such a gesture to work, but it was worth a try.

Lazily scrolling through the images on his card, Dave doesn’t feel anything startling. Sure the pictures are good, but he already knew they weren’t great so he doesn’t even know precisely why he is bothering. There isn’t all that much to gain from them. He isn’t really feeling the inspiration to be looking at pictures today anyway, it is far to hot in his room, (he had neglected to draw his curtains in the evening like Jade suggested,) and images of John are cluttering his mind, rusting it up, and locking in the gears which function as his consciousness. He closes his laptop, sets it on the side table, and without even bothering to unwrap the towel from around his waist or get under the blankets, is weighted down by the stifling warmth and sleeps.

✙

_Hell is not a fiery place._

_It’s not a scary place, or an even an alien one._

_Hell is his hometown, on a hot afternoon, watching the heavy vehicles pass lazily on the road far below the apartment, their motors groaning under the stress of the glaring sun._

_Dave observes the scene in his underwear, the windows open, his upper body hanging out because the air conditioner gave up the other week, and spewed springs and metal teeth everywhere in a merciless tantrum. Thanks to the purchase of Dave’s new camera, they are too poor to afford one more._

_From the kitchen comes the sound of Dave’s elder bro, cooking something horrible like re-fried Thai food or something, totally unaware of the brutal barfight which had three weeks prior taken his life. Bro Strider was a good guy, but he wasn’t very broad. He was too trapped in his own world to pay any attention to Dave, and why is it only now, now that all which is left is an echo in a dream, that Dave understands that? It was all there, in the cracked, tatty state of his brothers chewed nails. In his sun bleached hair and the small lines which graved around the disapproving corners of his mouth, though he had only been young. So young._

_Truth was, Bro was baked. And Dave is baking too, stuck here too close to the sun, melting in the heat…_

_Dizzy, the dehydration getting to him, Dave pushes sweaty bangs off his forehead and looks up, wrinkling his nose when below another truck passes and sends a roll of bitter, burning hot-tar smell surging to their window. The power lines criss-cross over the sky, and black shapes, winged and rustling, busy themselves upon it, making a heinous noise. Dave doesn’t understand how they can do that, stand so close to the fire way up high, dressed in black and yet not drop, one by one to their deaths. He supposes that it’s because they are birds, they can fly anywhere they want to. They don’t need to stay in this dilapidated urban machine, they don’t have to be boxed in and squared off, and suddenly Dave has an epiphany, about why life doesn’t always fit inside the frames of his camera._

_Life isn’t like him. It can’t be imprisoned on flat, impassionate paper, nor projected inside a single, limited box._

_Mournful, Dave sighs and erects himself, pulling back into the flat and wandering toward the kitchen, which is silent now, the ghostly noises of his sibling faded to the nothingness he had since become. It’s not messy in the kitchen, but there is a lot of sand. Sand in the cupboards, in the glasses, and pouring out of the sink. The taps spew wax when he tries to pour himself a drink, its thick and glogging and hardens in the cup before he can swallow a mouthful. The blades which adorn the walls (not just a dream addition but an actuality that when Dave wakes up, will probably have to deal with) wink at him cruelly, reflecting the sunlight which is freckling his skin, and sucking sweat over his shoulders and down his back. It’s hard to breathe, so he opens the fridge to stick his head in, maybe catch a breath of cool air._

_The fridge is on fire._

_Inside, where there should be shelves of food and providence, is a pit which stares straight into the river phlegethon. It singes Dave’s eyebrows, and he recoils, but the fire follows him, licking his heals as he tries to get away, get out of the room and out of the flat, even though he knows he can’t. The door is locked, he doesn’t even need to try the door handle._

_Dave is going to die in here, in this burning building, and in a last ditch hope he grabs the first thing he sees, a bowl of potato salad sitting on the coffee television, and throws it into the approaching flames. The window is cracking from the heat, as the fire swells in the room, and the air is beginning to shimmer, choking with smoke. He can’t see, the edges of his vision are beginning to sizzle._

_And then one of the windows smash, and glass flies everywhere in a spectacular cyclone of ash and glitter. Bewildered, having died here a million times and never having seen such a thing happen, Dave looks to the window, and sees a spectacular flash of blue, of satiny feathers carried on a tsunami of fresh air. The wind is cold, and it sends him spinning, a puppet on twisted, cut strings, through a far window and into space, and then he’s falling._

_He’s falling._

_He’s falling…_

✙ __

Dave sits bolt upright in the bed, gasping for breath. His back is sore, and his sheets are sticking to his sweaty skin.

The morning is clear and bright, and it makes him dizzy. Like a drunked he sways off his bed and stumbles through to his ensuite. A mirror… he needs a mirror. Where is he again? It takes him a moment to remember, upon seeing his face, red with heat and shining with perspiration, in the glass. He reaches for the rectangular frame, his fingers marking themselves on the edges, and croaks a sigh of relief because he can feel it. This is real, and the dream is gone.

Shaking a little, Dave scolds himself upright and runs his hands through his hair. He takes a moment to re-calibrate his mind, rubbing his eyes and trying to focus on something stable for a moment.

Breakfast.

Yes, breakfast.

He decides that this morning is one of the rare persuasion for which such dining would not be inappropriate, and immediately commences with showering, to rid himself of the sweat he had shed during the night. When he steps out, he feels a bit more refreshed, taking his clothing on without care, matching a pair of jeans with a red, arguably ‘summer’ shirt and black beanie. His shades to boot, because Dave doesn’t make a habit of going anywhere without them, and his camera with just a plain polarizing lens in the bag on his hip.

He bounces downstairs lightly, feeling strange but not in an entirely unpleasant way. It is a very subversive feeling, and difficult to define. It’s the sort of feeling one would associate with an excellent sleep, perhaps, though Dave has certainly not had that. Or some sort of post orgasmic feeling of fulfilment, which too Dave has not experienced thus far.

It is unusual, and it perks him somewhat. Jade smiles at him when he appears in the kitchen, a charming country style affair already occupied by an elder man reading a newspaper, and gestures to him a seat.

“Morning,” she chimes. “What did you want to eat? I’m just making pancakes.”

“Pancakes are good.” Dave tells her, tipping his head in an effort to read the headline of the mans paper. It is something uninteresting, about global warming, and Dave crinkles his nose. “Is there anything to drink?”

“Jugs.” Jade gestures to the kettle and canisters on the table, the labels of which read things like ‘sugar’, ‘coffee’ and ‘tea’, a thin ribbon of steam curling from the teapot spout. Beside these is a jug of frosty milk and two cartons of juice. One is apple, and Dave takes it calmly, pouring himself a helping into one of the small glass tumblers she had set out in a row in front.

“Cool.” He sips it and studies the space. The windows are lovely, old fashioned diamond panes glittering beckoningly. Once again, ‘unusual botanicals’ seems to be the theme. Jade hums, and the man turns the page of his paper.

“Any plans for today?” she asks him, clattering around the kitchen space for a plate. She sets five out, one for Dave and four more presumably for the other guests, but serves up only Dave’s pancakes to start.

He shrugs.

“Dunno…” it is like that taxi driver all over again. People always asking him what he is doing, where he is going… “Looking for a friend I suppose. You don’t have a city map I could borrow do you?”

Jade, busy trying to hunt down the syrup or Nutella or other pancake appropriate condiments, peeks over the top of the kitchen counter and smiles.

“Sure.”

And Dave gives her a tiny smile in return.

✙

Dave studies the map as he eats is toast, chewing thoughtfully, tracing the veins of the city with his eyes. He feels like today would be an appropriate day to go to the bridge, he can’t name why, although it probably has to do with the proximity of John’s hotel to the thing. Of course, the likelihood of him encountering John again is nigh zero, but Dave has a good feeling about this. A very good feeling about this. Infact, one could almost say he’s confident that come evening, he will be dining with the object of his obsession.

The devil is a wily bastard, and he has his mysterious ways.

Jade’s house is marked on the map with a small smiley face sticker, obviously she goes through the maps and pastes them all on for her guests convenience, and it is sure to prevent a repeat performance of the day before, in which Dave wandered around aimlessly in the general direction he wanted to go. The bridge would be a busride and ten minute walk away, and he doesn’t need to go back upstairs before he leaves, because everything he will need is already in his satchel. He brushes his teeth in the downstairs bathroom on the way out the door, and neglects, for the first time since his brother used to do his hair in the mornings, to brush his blonde locks into place. Without the careful guidance of a comb, they dry with a slight wave at the tips, and he looks a little rumpled as he sits on the bus, contemplating whether or not it would be worth wasting card space on the hobo slumped in the seat in front of him.

He decides against it. Hobos look the same in every city, and unlike in a starlit gutter in Texas the juxtaposition of this one is less than aesthetic. Even on an ironic level.

At the station though, he does take a photo of a dead bird by a rubbish bin. Somewhere along the line someone has trod in it, and smeared its entrails on the pavement. It looks just pitiful enough for Dave to think it beautiful.

The ghostly bones of the golden gate bridge lance the horizon, the shape of it described by the suddenly incoming fog which slowly melts as he draws near. The ocean in the harbour glitters, shattering the watery light which leaks through the haze, and Dave, breath dancing merrily on his lips, skin glistening with jewely dampness, thinks that from such a clear morning the mist has moved in swiftly, blotting out the sky and cooling the breathing earth. Overall, it is an unusual meteorological spike noticed not just by Dave but by everyone in the city. Gone is the clear morning, it is like winter again, and the streetlamps click on one by one down the street. Mothers glance anxiously out their window and fear for the laundry they have just hung, businessmen look up from computer screens and worry about how they are going to drive home through this miasma. Dave wishes he had brought his cross filter, and checks his satchel in futility. No matter. There is plenty of opportunity to take photos of pretty lights.

As Dave draws closer to the bridge, the sound of traffic echoes in the obscurity of space, and it feels like evening though it’s perhaps drawing near only midday. A few young couples are walking along the harbour side, and a jogger passes Dave by as he crosses the road and finds himself on a walkway beside the water. There are a few boats on the waterfront, and like luminous ants cars arch over the bridge road. It’s very still, the mist sighs quiet, and Dave feels intrinsically almost as soon as he reaches the railing of the harbour walkway that he should sit down, be still, and wait.

✙

It is one pm when Dave’s cellphone, in the bottom of his satchel, rings, and he digs it out and checks the number, noting it is unknown.

“Sup.” He answers it calmly, although inside he is really nothing but calm, “Dave Strider speaking.”

The person on the other end is silent for a moment, before crackling into speech.

“Hi Dave.” It’s a man, his accent uppity and clear. “It’s John. From the potato salad?”

Dave isn’t slighted by the fact the man introduced himself as being ‘from the potato salad’. He takes a moment to close his eyes and draw calm, though his hands shake and his heart is palpitating. He knew it. Good god he _knew_ it. And he has never been so relieved in his life.

“Hi John from the potato salad.” He chews his lip anxiously and glances left and right, down the walkway overlooking the water. The sound of it lapping over stones placidly is not helping his composure.

“Um… yes.” There is an awkward pause, and Dave knows he can’t say anything until John talks again. Finally, he picks up.

“So yesterday when you fell into our picnic you lost your wallet.”

“Did I?” Dave had noticed so much, but thought nothing of it. There was nothing important in there, just his licence and a few business cards. His credit card had long since been cancelled and his cash assets were near nil.

“Um, yes. There was no money in there.”

He knows this already.

“Uh huh.”

“But there was this… cardy thing? With your number?”

“And so you thought you would call so I could get it back.”

The silence on John’s end clearly implies that he thinks, by this reaction, he has done something wrong.

“I um… was I not supposed to or…”

“No no. its fine.” Dave clicks his tongue and leans back in his bench. “I’m actually in the city at the moment. At the harbour. Did you want to bring it?”

“Oh? Um… yes. Sure. That sounds like a good idea.” He laughs lightly and Dave’s stomach flip flops. “I need to get away from the old fiancée… she’s still very upset about the potato salad. She told me I should have burned your wallet.”

“Lovely woman.”

“Aww… Rose is lovely. She’s just a bit no-shit a lot of the time.”

“Hm.” Dave really doesn’t want to hear about how lovely John’s fiancée may be. “Well, do you want to bring my Wallet down? I was going to go back to the bed and breakfast, but I can wait for you here.”

“Sure! I will message you when I’m closer for more directions.”

John hangs up and Dave sits there for a while, listening to the dialtone beeping in his ear.

✙

The shape of a man emerges from the fog, although Dave can’t say he is instantly recognisable. Against the cold, he wears a large coat, scarf, and trilby hat, which cuts a severe silhouette and ages him significantly. Dave is standing by the railings, gazing at the ghostly bridge and listening to the distant horns and breaks. They have grown louder as the afternoon has progressed, and navigating the clogged streets became more difficult. They bounce eerily off the fog, and it sounds like the cities heartbeat, staccato and troubled.

Dave pulls his camera up and takes a photo of John as he approaches, one or two brief squares of black against blue, rectangular glasses reflecting plastically even without flash. He seems a little put out, but unsurprisingly Dave doesn’t care, stepping forward and swaying in the middle of the path, his bare arms prickling, his shades fogged with his breath.

“Hey.” He greets the other man, and then thinks he really needs to work on his salutations. “I mean, Hi. Thanks for coming.”

“No problem.” John hands over the wallet in question, stopping a few feet back and trying not to make it too obvious. He doesn’t have anything against Dave, but he does make him feel a bit strange. The man has odd karma, the world seems to slow down around him, like some nexus of discomforted energy, and though John isn’t able to define this he certainly feels it, and he isn’t sure if he wants to get close enough for it to touch him. “I would hope you’d do the same.”

Dave sighs, an honest man, if a questionable one.

“Actually, I would probably have just left it there. But I do appreciate it all the same.” He chews his lip, and it tastes a little coppery. Somewhere along the line he has gnawed a split in it. “But um, while I think on it, did I loose a lens in your picnic too?” Dave knows he did not, but he wants to keep the conversation running. Primarily because John looks like he’s considering taking leave. A puzzled expression passes over John’s attractive face, and he removes his hat, ruffling his hair.

“A… what?”

“Lens. Like…” Dave pulls his satchel around and produces his polarizer, “it goes on the front of the camera.”

He tries to step forward, but John moves back, in a distant mockery of some kind of dance. It’s not a cruel motion, it’s subconscious, but all the same Dave notices and feels a little kick in his stomach.

“Um…” holding his hat in front of him protectively, John shakes his head. “Nooo… sorry.” he glances up and his eyes try hunting for Dave’s eyes behind his glasses. Through darkened lenses, he is no less beautiful, the vivid blue of his eyes piercing in the drab greyness. Courtesy pushes him, convinced that there is something lacking in this conversation, and he struggles to figure out what it might be when faced with Dave’s blank expression. Unable to make eye contact, he tries reaching out another way, to conclude the interaction and be on his way. It is getting so cold out now he can feel it even through his coat.

“Are you not freezing?” he asks, noting the red in Dave’s cheeks, and the dampness in his hair. “You don’t even have a coat.”

Dave shrugs.

“I like the cold. It’s too hot where I come from.”

“Oh.” recognising something he could follow through, John nods. “South right? I can tell from your accent.”

“Texas.”

“Ooooh! Neat.”

Happy with this development, John feels like now he can leave without social guilt. He pops his hat back on, a silly thing he doesn’t really like but he wears because his dad gave it to him, and smiles. “Whelp, anyway. I best be off. Have a good evening tho-“

“Wait!” Dave cuts him off, feeling a sudden urge to stop him. “No, wait a sec.”

John hesitates, leaning back from the other almost anxiously. He is surprised by the intensity of his outburst. Dave calms himself, and clears his throat.

“Sorry, I just… well, I’m here without any company at the moment, I was just thinking it would be really cool if um… you and I might go for a beer? Or something to eat? Just two guys chillin’… wasting some time…”

John blinks at him, recognising the proposal instantly as more than just a friendly or thankful gesture, but unable to define it as a romantic one. After all, in Dave’s mind, its not. Precisely. But then it’s not entirely platonic either. He’s planned it all out in his mind, the bar they can go to, the conversation, the way he will take John back to Jade’s and photograph him, make love with him, drag him straight to hell or follow him to heaven who really cares. It’s all there, in his minds eye, and in his characteristic, straightforward way, Dave is not going to pass this opportunity by. He’s driven. He’s besotted. He thinks that being here with John is like standing on an event horizon, and the long walk of life which has drawn to now is going to be decided, either way. John cant say no. He mustn’t…

And in any normal situation he would have, but for some reason John feels bound by an un-nameable force. The same force which fills Dave with aggressive confidence, the same force which had carried him here on the winds of whim, and the same force which draws the fog off the sea this day, hiding the inhabitants of the city from the eyes of demon and god. Filled with esoteric magnetism, like two toys strung by threads of nylon fate, Dave and John are tangled now, irrevocably tied, and as far as John tried to run away he would never be able to shake the memory, never be able to shake the ‘what if’ that will consume him if he walks away.

Like a vacuum, Dave’s emptiness is sucking him down, and he can’t help it, he cant help it, and he isn’t sure if he will be strong enough to escape the enchantment posed by hidden, burned out eyes.

“I don’t drink.”

“Great.” Dave tips his chin back and tries to approach him again. John doesn’t move. “I don’t either.”

✙

They walk in silence down the path, shoes crunching over gravel. Night is falling, and Dave is walking with his shoulders back and his nose high, John beside him looking deathly guilty, hands scrunched into the pockets of his coat. He thinks briefly of Rose, remembers how she had dismissed him that morning, and decides that perhaps it was better for him to just give her some time. A nice friendly drink of orange juice or something with Dave, and he will go back. He can’t just run away from this. For the first time in his life John is actually feeling an obligation, and he isn’t about to let it lie. He doesn’t think he can find it in himself, to do that. Besides, Dave is nice. A little disturbing, but nice. Although he could do without all the seemingly random photographs.

There’s a starbucks Dave passed on his way in that morning, and they gravitate there without actually making a conscious decision. Dave is relieved it’s still open, though no-one is there. He holds the door open for John, who seems startled by the gesture, but flattered.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

He lets the door click shut behind them.

After being outside, the warmth in the room is cosy. John peels off his coat and reveals a pale blue sweater, the wool of which is of that particular soft variety only a girlfriend would buy, and his hat and scarf are dropped unceremoniously on a window side table. Dave removes his glasses, letting his eyes flicker closed to hide them, and wipes the lenses on the hem of his shirt. He opens them again when the shades are replaced, and he ignores the puzzled look he receives from John for it.

“Why…”

“I’m an artist John. It’s ironic.”

“Irony is an art form now?”

This idiotic question gets a dry look, Dave pulls out a seat and drops into it, setting his camera on the table. He swears when it knocks the sugar cellar over, spilling the glittery white crystals over the surface of the table. John hisses and jumps on it.

“Careful Dave, its bad luck to spill salt!” he picks up the cellar and tries to scoop the sugar into his palm, not before throwing a fingerful at Dave’s face.

“Chill brother its just sugar.” To prove it Dave swipes his pointer through the small puddle of white and licks it off. “See? All sweet and shit.”

“… oh.” John feels a bit ridiculous. He pulls a face and sits down, scooping the spilled sugar into a napkin stolen from the table next door. “Oops.”

“Easy mistake to make.” Dave sighs and begins to help dust up the missed grains. John too, busies himself trying to brush the strays off the table. They spend about fifteen seconds doing this, before accidently on purpose Dave’s fingers brush the tip of John’s, and the dark haired man feels a bolt of god knows what shoot up his arm, startling him so much he jumps. It’s hot and painful, and leaves his arm aching numb and shaking, but _oh god_ does that ache feel good! Sort of like the way he might imagine being hit by lightning would feel. Dave notices him snap his hand away, and his eyebrows pull questioningly.

“Alright?”

“Um…?” John regards his hand, which is throbbing and hot, but looks the same as it had the very morning before. “Yeah. Sorry, my minds playing tricks on me. I’ve been pretty stressed lately.” He tucks his hand tightly into his armpit and leans back in his chair.

“Oh?” Dave finishes up with the sugar and reaches for the scrunched napkin in which John had been depositing it. “What for?”

“My fiancée, rose?”

“Ah…” Dave nods in understanding, twisting the full napkin closed and setting it on the windowsill. “Right. I could have figured that out if I thought about it long enough.”

John chucked a little. “Probably. Ladies right? Crazy creatures… she’s so serious all the time. Can’t take a joke…”

“To be fair the one about the foot in the potato salad wasn’t the best one-liner ever.”

This earns a real laugh from John, and it is stupid, snorty and embarrassing on his part, and it makes him flush red, but to Dave it sounds like the voice of an angel, and it glitters on the edge of his ears.

“Oh wow, I’m sorry.” John struggles to straighten his face, but the total deadpan expression on Dave’s made him almost unable to do so. “But that was funny.”

“… Ohkay?” Dave hadn’t been trying to be funny, but he isn’t going to pass up an opportunity. “That’s cool I guess?”

John shakes his head and hides his smile behind his hand.

“Sorry.” he apologises. “Sorry. I tend to spaz a little when I’m nervous.”

Dave’s eyebrow arches, primarily because he had not heard the word ‘spaz’ since he was a child on a playground, but also because this is the first sign he has received of John perhaps being less than totally composed. Its news to John too, and he says it in pretty much the same way he says everything. That is, it just comes out of his mouth, an unguarded expression of thoughts that may not yet have occurred to him.

Because John is pretty nervous right now. Or at least, as nervous as a suburban middle class man with a cheerful life and pretty fiancée can be.

Dave presses his lips together and considers trying to take a picture, because the raw, open expression on John’s face is just so beautiful it hurts.

“Yeah… I guess… nervous…” he trails off, turning his face away because frankly, he can’t look at the man without a lens much longer. He’s blinding. His gaze falls on the specials list, and he sighs.

“Anyway, I am going to have an iced chocolate. You? Ironic, by the way. The Iced chocolate…” he clears his throat awkwardly and turns his attention to finding his wallet. “What about you?”

“Oh no it’s okay I can buy my own.”

“No.” Dave takes his eftpos card out of his wallet and pushes his shades up the bridge of his nose. “it’s okay, I can pay.”

John blinks at him, with those adorable, big blue eyes.

“Um, okay. Thanks.”

Dave grunts.

“What do you want?”

✙

The two men finish the first round of milk based-beverages, and then John buys another, which they take to go. They walk out onto the street with the warm paper cups in flushed, ungloved hands, cheeks ruddy even in the dark and their breathing immortalised in crystal webs on the air. John lends Dave his scarf, when he sees the other mans arms are prickled with cold, and Dave takes it with an excited heart leap, his face refusing to betray the birds beating for freedom in his chest. It smells clean and sweet, like the breeze that rolls of the harbour, zephyrous perfumes that make Dave feel a little dizzy, and he buries his nose in it reverently.

“So how long are you here for?”

“Dunno really. When I run out of money maybe? Haven’t thought that far ahead.”

They have covered the basics so far, from whence they came, what brings them to San Francisco, and John sharing heartfelt condolences for Dave and his brotherly loss. Dave even got to explain a little about his photography, although like a fool he slipped up just as he was about to ask if maybe John would like to play models for an evening. John seems much more agreeable about being photographed now he understands Dave’s an artist. He is somewhat flattered by the explanation ‘I like to photograph expressive things’, and as he walks down the street at Dave’s side, he is doing so with a cheerful bounce that reminds Dave quite forcibly of a fourteen year old boy. His smiling, and Dave’s heart is throbbing with the need to snap his image. So much so that he has to stop down a misty, lamp lit street, right beside a park with swings that creak mournfully and chain link fencing that glistens in the cool white light, and set his half drunk chocolate (hot this time, because iced chocolate seemed like a bad idea when one was going out in eight degrees Celsius) on the pavement next to a parking metre.

“Can I take some more photos?” he asks this time, pulling his camera strap off his shoulder and around his neck. “Maybe if you smile a bit?”

This makes John blush and smile more, although he tries to hide it unsuccessfully.

“What?”

“Please? Look, I even asked, aren’t I just thigh slappingly polite and shit?”

John laughs and runs his hand through his rumpled black hair. His glasses wink in the light, and Dave lets a little grin pull the corner of his mouth.

“Okay. but first…” bravely, John steps forward, and before Dave knows what’s happening his glasses are being touched, lifted off his nose and placed carefully on his head. “Take these off. You can’t see anything with them on can you?”

Dave blinks, seeing John in real life, with bare eyes, for the very first time.

The man is blinding. He seems to positively _glow_. The lamplight fingers his hair just right, the darkness pooling in shadows under his cheekbones and by extension drawing quicksilver highlight to his cheeks and the bow of his lovely lips. His eyes are bordered evenly, by stubbly lashes that murmur ghostly promises of tickling against skin, and the blue of them shines even at night. Without the breaker of shades or camera, Dave can see no edges to the numinous aura which glows around him, and it feels so good, it _looks_ so good. He can’t even describe how wonderful it is, and in that instant he _knows_. He will never forget this. He will never forget John. He will see him forever, every time he closes his eyes, and he doesn’t need to photograph it to preserve it forever because it’s there, a part of the chemical frame of his body forever and ever amen.

And John, as soon as he does so, feels something in him snag, as though he’s been burned around the edges by something and hauled forcibly down, and then he’s being dragged forward and something hot and soft is being pressed against his pillowed, cool lips.

Dave is kissing him. His hands are cupped around his chin, and he tastes bitter and coppery, but John cannot pull away. He can’t, because Dave is so warm, and his kissing is so skilful, and his tongue is shy but gentle and it tastes a little singed but there’s a sweet sugary aftertaste that John just melts for. Rose has never kissed him so passionately, so lovingly, and then as soon as it happens it’s over, an event of maybe three seconds, and yet for John it feels like it might have lasted forever.

He stands there awkwardly, lips parted in shock, eyes wide and fixed on Dave’s. They are dark, he can’t see the colour but he can see they are dark. Sucking him in, dragging him in like a dying sun collapses on itself. Dave looks totally eclipsed, totally lost. He’s looking at John with the kind of blind awe a stag stares into headlights with, and mostly it’s because he can’t believe what he just did. How stupidly brash a thing it was for him to do. His lips tingle with the ghost of John’s.

To a stranger, it was no more startling a kiss than any other, brief and awkward in a darkened street as a prom king might kiss his date. The earth didn’t stop spinning, the stars didn’t drop from the curtain of the sky. Lightning didn’t strike, the fog didn’t part, and the street lights didn’t flicker or buzz with esoteric whispers. As far as kisses go, it was normal.

But between the beating chests of two strangers, it is the beginning of the end of the world.

✙

The two men don’t go to John’s, it makes no sense. After all, Rose is there, and if there’s one condition on which John goes through with this it’s the condition that Rose _never_ finds out.

Jade doesn’t seem bothered. Or at least, she doesn’t notice the two of them steal up stairs on a roll of hushed laughter and giddiness. By the time they got to the top John has lost his coat and his jumper, and one of his large, cool hands is slipped up the chest of Dave’s top. The feeling couldn’t have been more perfect. Alabaster fingertips against freckles and warmth, parted lips against parted lips and hips pressed teasingly against thigh. Dave is wild, maddened with lust untamed, and John responds with energy, clinging to Dave’s shoulders and stumbling backward through the door. The two tumble onto the bed, bouncing where they land, and it’s a comfortable temperature in there, the curtains open and the bare windows leaking the warmth that may have accumulated in the space over the stretch of the evening. Between them, things are heating up, but it’s a comforting warm, like the warm of clean sand on a summer beach, or the warm of a breeze through grass. John’s arms are strong. They hold Dave comfortably, and Dave melts dreamily against him, the line between their lips dissolving and the fissure between bodies feathering as clothing is peeled off and cast aside.

John tastes so good.

The more he tastes it the sweeter, the more ambrosial the flavour becomes. Its so fresh it makes the hair on Dave’s neck prickle, and his every sense fires on over drive as John rolls him over, dragging him up the bed and beginning to kiss his neck, striking his tongue languidly across the skin there and drawing it teasingly behind the root of Dave’s ear. A devastating shiver runs down his spine, and reverently the slender youth arches up, his skin tingling where he touched John’s bare stomach and chest. His nipples, flat under John’s palm, erect and rub against John’s, and light fingers trace over the delightfully foreign terrain of his smooth, masculine body. John’s never touched anther man before, and this morning he would never have dreamed that he ever would, yet here he is, lost almost in awe as he caresses Dave’s toasty skin. The grooves of his ribs are alien. The slant of his waist and hips perfectly proportioned but strange. John loves the angles of his consort, he loves the way Dave is firm beneath him. He revels in the stable, mechanical construction of hips and shoulders and arms that curl and snake, and pull him hard against something horribly heavy and uncomfortable.

“Fuck Dave hang on hang on.” John sits up and pulls Dave’s camera off his shoulder. He sets it on the side table, and Dave exhales deeply, the relief of having that weight removed borderline orgasmic.

“ _John_.”

“Shh. Calm down, I’m here.”

“Fuck me.” Filled with the fury of passion, still blinded by John’s halo, Dave props himself up and grabs the other mans hair. His voice is soft, short, and breathless, but it’s not the dry sort of breathlessness he knows no, instead it is the breathlessness of adrenaline; the breathlessness of shooting into space and not knowing where one might land.

For the first time Dave feels like he’s unbridled, and its driving him absolutely _drunk_. Those black birds of death scratching wasted, frail bodies had nothing on the wind that filled his lungs. The feeling of air between feathers is nothing on the sensation of John’s fingers in his hair and popping the buttons on his shirt.

His shades are cast carelessly to the floor, and Dave wiggles back onto the bed, so the two are lying in proper position, head at the pillows. Dave is quickly fenced in, head sinking back against the duck feather comfort, John’s kisses pressing him down. He flings his arms around John’s neck and only then, when he feels John’s body grind against his, does he realise with a lurch that they have yet to touch each other intimately, but they will. Oh yes they will, and this notion makes him whine, parting his lips enough for John to nibble them lightly, and nudge his face back to get to his throat. He ignores Dave’s freckles, as he slides slowly down Dave’s chest, pulling a nipple into his mouth in precisely the way instinct dictates, nothing more. It’s harder to do when there is no breast to back it, his nose gets in the way and he has nothing to kneed, so instead he uses his hands to touch Dave’s hips. They are high and boney, and quiver in his grip.

Dave feels it in between his legs, tingling and warm, and he longs with a tearing moan that John would touch him. So much so that he runs his hands down his sides, finds John’s fingers, and knots them. It seems so easy to guide one down to his crotch and press it in, and _oh god_ does that feel good. So good he rubs it, stroking John’s hand over the area, and John is charmed by his eagerness. He decides not to waste time and pushes Dave’s hand aside to pull down his zipper. His fingers creep down the laid line of fine blonde hairs on Dave’s flat tummy, delving smoothly under the elastic and exhaling with a sigh of anxious relief when Dave makes an odd, deeply erotic noise and snaps his hands to John’s shoulders. He strokes it up pretty fast, and with each somewhat cautious pull Dave shivers and tosses his head first to the left, then the right, his hair falling into a disarrayed halo around his shadowed face. It’s golden and flowing, and John buries his face in it deeply, breathing the scent and leaving the wet nipple he had licked and teased to painful stiffness to prickle in the cool air. Dave is circumcised, which presents a problem in terms of masturbating him, and John feels horribly incompetent when through the abrasive haze of pleasure Dave tries to stop him, hissing something about hand cream in the backpack by the door.

John’s never had to use something to ease up the experience, so once he’s hurried over and grabbed the cream in question, he finds it very odd to have to dollop an amount in his hand before resuming his sloppy handjob. Dave feels the difference immediately, and completely unabashed he groans, opening his legs and moving his hips with the steady pulls. His breath is short and he feels like he’s flowing, like unassumed energy is ebbing through his body like a tide, like the invisible currents in the wind that leak from his fingers and the points of his toes, rolling him up and playing him in place. There is no space huge enough to contain the feelings racking him, no borders to his soaring bliss. Not even John’s body, pressing so firm against his side, an anchor him. Not even the lips which drive against his, eager for the taste of salt and pepper, can hold him down.

John fumbles with his own jeans as he jacks Dave off, pulling his own erection out and taking in his same hand. Dave pulls away and looks at him blearily, running his hands over John’s cheeks and panting, a small, ecstatic smile ghosting full, parted lips.

“ _Take of your glasses…”_

His voice is heavy, leaking the desire coursing through his veins. John jerks his head in a gesture that its okay for Dave to do so, and the glasses are dropped carelessly on the side table. Bare faced John strokes his nose along the precise razor of Dave’s, trembling a little for how wonderful it feels rubbing against him in such a sensitive, intimate way. Dave curves his back and whines, unable to take much more, and hits John’s hands away. Wordlessly, he kicks off his jeans and underwear, finding the discarded bottle of hand cream between his sheets and emptying a generous amount on his hand. Dave’s very scrupulous about what he uses to finger fuck himself, as well as what he puts on his sensitive skin, and hence has no hesitations with reaching between his thighs and stroking the lotion over his perineum and dipping inside himself. He knows that for the price he pays for this organic bullshit, he could probably eat the goddamned stuff. It will cause him not harm. John however, goes to stop him.

“You can’t use that!”

“Sh.” Dave silences him, taking a moment to study John’s face illustrated in photonegative blues. Their eye contact lasts, and as he resumes Dave reaches forward, kissing the man deeply and flexing his fingers as best he can. It’s a gloriously sexy thing to behold, and even if he had noticed he would never have dreamed of stopping John from touching himself while it happened. The little noises that slip from his lips are divine.

When he’s ready for John he makes no sigh besides pulling the mans hair back and swinging himself over, settling in a straddled position and leaving John startled, gasping for breath. Without missing a beat Dave finds his dick and notches it in, falling back onto John with a painful gasp and eyelash flutter. John rolled his head back and sighed, unable to even _compare_ this experience with anything he’s ever done before. Dave is just so sexy, silhouetted against the uncurtained window, and the way he takes cock is just _ace_.

“Oh hell Dave.”

Dave grunts and lifts himself up, biting his lip when he feels John pierceing him again. From beneath John groans, because Dave is just so tight and feels so fucking good, and he flings out a hand to brace himself on the bed behind him. His left collides with the side table, and catches the strap of Dave’s camera, and he thinks in a sudden, stabbing instant that he _knows_ the beauty Dave covets in the silver chloride shadows of life, he _knows_ the latent perfection in every living thing and in every single detail of Dave’s body, face, and mind. He’s never wanted to capture a moment more in his life, as the angel on his hips moves and rolls with his own delirious rhythm, reaching for a freedom known only in his own limitless psyche.  Breath becomes short, hot, like he’s burning up bit by bit, and the need to imprint this image in his mind becomes crippling, yet every time he closes his eyes he can’t, he’s too burned by Dave’s passion. He’s too entrapped in the crossfire of rapture rocking through the marrow of his bones.

“Dave.”

A cry of lust lights from Dave’s chest, lilting breezily through the aetherous space. He drags languidly against John’s dick, pressing it against his prostate and curling his shoulders back. It’s wonderful here. He’s never felt so powerful in his life.

John winces when the tide of his motion becomes rough. Not painfully rough, more like a desperate rough, and he tries to slow them down because if Dave keeps up like this he’s going to cum before he can really indulge in the closeness, or the warmth of Dave’s body. He needs Dave closer, and tries to drag him down, but the other man is too far out of reach, trying to heave John up and up and up. He wants them to cum together, to catapult off the edge of the world together and fall helplessly into the void.

“ _John_.” Short of breath he runs a hand reverently over John’s face, all trace of irony, composure, and awkwardness gone on a breath. Nothing has ever felt so natural or so perfect, and John, whose never been caressed so lovingly, with so much heart and soul behind it, closes his eyes and gives in to the rocking quake which accompanies orgasm, slamming into Dave’s body and thinking only of how intimately the two of them are joined in that moment. How close they are, almost dangerously so, and how tomorrow when Dave gets up and walks around, he will feel it seeping down his legs and wetting the inside of his smooth, pale thighs.  

John’s fingers curl around Dave’s wrists and he holds tight, willing Dave to climax with every part of his soul. As inch by inch cloying release ropes its way up his spine, and John reached forward to stroke his erection in time, Dave’s breath grows airy, pained, and bit by bit he dances around the edge. His hips jerk one final time, and the sudden mind blowing rush of muscles seizing and releasing in cataclysmic regiments make him cry a noise that would probably have humiliated him in any other circumstance, but John thinks it’s just gorgeous. There’s a moment of endless blankness, and everything seems to fall still around him, before spent and exhausted Dave collapses on John’s chest and slowly, in time with his lovers worshiping heartbeat, the earth begins to spin again. Kisses rain on his forehead, his cheeks, his lips, and Dave feels like he’s finally holding the thing he’s always wanted in his hands. Dave is so in love, he’s positively chaotically in love, and for all the beautiful pictures that consumed his waking consciousness, and the black and white frames that flickered through his sleeping mind, he thinks he’s seeing right now the most flawless image of limitless humanity he’s ever beheld in his life.

That’s a glorious, liberating belief to hold in the foreset of ones mind.

✙

John sits up for what seems like an age afterwards, so long even that the sun begins to creep into the sky before he realises what he’s just done.

Dave sleeps peacefully beside him, and as the first cut of dawn slides into the room John checks his watch. It reads six-fourteen am. The time they had at last fell apart from their blurry half conscious embrace had been about two. John has found no sleep between these hours. Instead, he lies in bed sweating like an inconsolable pig. He feels feverish, as though the heat his body had worked up during his passionate late night tryst had not faded, and he’s numb as though the uncountable times the two had made love had gnawed his bones down to unfeeling stubs, and replaced them with stifling cotton wool. His tiredness hurts, but not as much as his heart. He feels like Dave’s nails have gouged lines there, be them a genuine sign of passion or an ironic artistic statement about the isolation of a single human being, the ache a man feels to draw close to heaven with someone else, if only for a while.

Weary, John sits up and rubs his temples, which are throbbing with tiredness and stress. Rose begins to occur to him, at the back of his mind. What will he tell her? Can he even tell her anything? He isn’t sure he can go back now. Not covered in hickeys and spoiled for love by this unmatched beauty. Yet even in unconsciousness Dave is slipping away from him. He already seems so far, so distant. The perfect smile on his lips, the way his hair fans on the pillow. Drifting away, suddenly untouchable and nothing like the scruffy wraith like man who fell from the sky the day they met, John wants nothing more than to capture him, to keep him. To preserve him forever and ever and ever…

He turns his head aside, and finds himself gazing into the lens of Dave’s heavy black camera.

And suddenly, John is stolen by a fugitive idea.

Nervously he picks the camera up and weights it in his hand. He rolls it around, studying the dials, and running his thumb over the digital view screen. It’s all too easy to flick it on, and the soft start up chime makes him jump, but doesn’t rouse Dave from his slumber. Before anything else, John clicks what he thinks is the review button, and is met with a frame of his own face, shadowed oddly, looking much more like a stranger than he ever could have thought. He presses next, and in fact most of the photos on the camera are of him, and the ones that aren’t are too lit with a melancholy strangeness. In the light of Dave’s pictures, John wonders if indeed he’s ever seen a tree before, or a street light, or a bird in flight. The images seem to move and change, and they inspire fearful emotions in him. They are like real life magnified, except so much so that he feels it in a way he’s never experienced reality before. Its frustrating, because for all its flawlessness it’s a simple tease, and he wishes Dave had managed to capture more photos, maybe expand his frame some more, so that John could see the entire world through these eyes.

Tersely, John turns the camera on Dave and exits review, snapping a brief picture and then watching it flicker up on the screen. It’s okay. the auto-focus captured the colours right, and the picture sure does match the scene before him, but for some reason the shadows in the sheet rumples aren’t deep enough, the placidness of Dave’s expression not alive enough…

The light that seems to glow around him is not visible, in the pixels on screen.

Frustrated, John rakes his hands through his hair and sets the camera on the bedside. Dave shifts, rolling onto his side, his hand creeping through the sheets and brushing against John’s leg. He sighs, and the sound plucks at John’s heartstrings. That breath. So beautiful…

John is too sore to remain in bed. He slips out at around six thirty and sets about pulling on his clothes. He tells himself he will come back, once he’s gone for a walk, once he has cleared his mind and cast the overwhelming shadow of loss and discomfort from his shoulders, he will come back. He _promises_ it.

He hesitates just before he leaves, and with a deep breath he sweeps over Dave in bed, placing a kiss on those lovely lips in a vain hope to recapture something, anything…

It escapes him. And he leaves with a leaden heart, knowing despite his promise that once he left, no matter how much the sun gained in the sky and the warmth spills into Dave’s top storey room, he will not be coming back.

✙

The unnaturally hot spring afternoon which Dave wakes to is not one of picnics or beachly frolics, rather it is bleached and sweltering, tainted by the bitter taste of not brushing ones teeth before one goes to bed. His back is sore, and his head is groggy, and his skin sticks to the sheets on the bed which lies directly in the shaft of sunlight. Since noon the sun has drifted around, and the heat has sliced through the glass, heating the room to stifling temperatures and begging Dave to ask why the _hell_ he hadn’t closed the curtains the night before.

And then he thinks it was probably because he and John had had _much_ more important things to worry for, than closing the curtains.

Smiling a little Dave rolls over, and cracks open his red-brown eyes. It takes him a moment to notice that the space beside him is empty, the sheets hot with sunlight but not with the comforting heat of another body.

He sits hurriedly up, and looks around. Sweat glistens on his shoulder blades and wets the roots of his frazzled hair. The only other occupant of the room is his shadow, elongated and seared onto the back wall.

“… John?”

There’s no reply, and for the first time Dave lets a leak of panic into his voice.

“John? Are you here?”

He stumbles out of bed, totally naked, and strides to the window at which that goddamned sun is pressing. Outside, he sees nothing, just the tar sealed street of a city just like any other, the buildings keeping smug mum, their windows winking cruelly at his confusion. A few black birds lark low over the empty road, their wings creating gracious arcs as they soar.

Dave Strider is a cool guy; in fact he’s atypically cool for a Texan, but cut out of his box-camera world and flung recklessly into the open sky he’s falling fast, and it's all hells of a long way down. 


End file.
